COURSE of the MONTH

What can I do to upgrade this laptop. Especially the hard drive.

I've got an IBM T42. Here is a picture of the system now. I have upgraded the RAM. But that is the only thing I've touched. I'm now addicted to upgrading my hardware in the endless quest for more speed and capacity to run video editing software.

Anyway, I bought this HD a while back but have not installed it yet. Wondering if this is the best option. I can still get an RMA for it so it's not a big deal. Also, for changing HD's in a laptop. I'm assuming making an image on an external HD is the safest way to make the change. However, this is my work Laptop provided by the company so I don't have the OS disc. I can probably get it. Do I need that or can I boot the external HD and reinstall the image to the new HD.

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"... I'm now addicted to upgrading my hardware in the endless quest for more speed and capacity ..." ==> Welcome to the club :-) [keep checkbook handy --> over the years I've spent well over six digits on this stuff !!]

Upgrading from 5400rpm to 7200rpm will make a nice difference in the "feel" of the laptop. The cache difference is much less signficant, so don't be concerned about that. Either of the drives you've listed will be fine.

Be sure you create a set of Rescue and Recovery CD's from your laptop before you remove the old hard drive -- otherwise you'll have to purchase a Recovery CD from Lenovo.

IBM uses a special recovery partition on most Thinkpads (using a hardware device to do so, so it's not even "visible" to partition management software). If you have a blue "Access IBM" button, yours is one of these. But as long as you create the recovery CDs, you should have no problem recovering to a new hard drive. You could also simply image the system to an external drive; then restore it to the new drive -- but then you wouldn't have the "Access IBM" capability (I presume that if you use their Rescue & Recovery CD's you will still have that capability).

HOWEVER ... if the ONLY reason you're doing this upgrade is to gain a bit of hard drive speed, you may want to just buy a large external drive and gain not only better hard drive speed; but also much more space (320GB or more for the same price as the drives you've listed above). Your system has USB v2.0 ports, so you would get very good performance with this alternative.

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It's part speed, part space. I keep getting emails that are bigger and bigger. I have to detach all large files to keep under the 100 mb limit we have for storing e-mails. I use an external HD when I am in the office but I don't want to have to tote that thing around too.

However, the external HD I have now is only a 60 gig WD passport. Can that even be considered a HD or is that just a "mass storage device"? Also, are you saying that if I change that to something bigger I could get more speed (and storage) without changing anything else. How so? Just leave OS and other job related essential programs on internal HD and move everything else to external?

I may just do both. And add some led lights and a disco ball to my docking station. :)

LED lights and a disco ball are reported to provide substantial performance gains -- but I haven't actually tried them :-)

... a WD passport is hard drive, but it's based on a 5400rpm notebook drive, so it's appreciably slower than a 7200rpm 3.5" drive (transfer rate is more than double on a 3.5" 7200 rpm drive). Since you have a USB v2 port, you can transfer data to/from the external drive at 480Mb/s, so you'd notice a very nice gain with a 3.5" external drive (it will also be much faster than a 7200rpm notebook drive).

... but you WILL notice an improvement with a 7200rpm internal drive as well. Simple math: 7200/5400 = 1.33 time as fast :-)

You can say that and upgrade is going UP and an update is updating something, for me, it is almost the same thing. Sorta.
I mean I use the two interchangeably. You're upgrading and updating your system. If you get something new, bigger, better, faster, it's an upgrade. "scrore!" If you update your house, you might be putting an addition onto it. I don't know if there is a house part to "upgrade" but if you have 1 and add 1 more, then that's often thought of as upgrading. You have a laptop with 128MB RAM you can upgrade to 128MB+ to get 256MB total, as an upgrade. You could say that you updated your system to perform faster.
Yes, I am NOT Webster from the dictionary, and this English degree is probably not showing off, however I am not going to go all out and make this grammitcally correct just to try to get my point across. (said playfully).

I hope I wasn't confusing. I was annoyed that EVERYONE seemed to answer the question before "I" did, but I wanted to offer a fix, wherever I could.
I hope I added a bit of assurance, that many people said the same thing.